


dug the trenches that we made

by antumbral



Category: Le Dernier Jour
Genre: 1000-2500 words, Character Study, First Time, M/M, Photography, Pre-Canon, Swimming, outside pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-19
Updated: 2009-11-19
Packaged: 2017-10-03 09:16:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antumbral/pseuds/antumbral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prequel to the film. <i>Mathieu visits the pool late in the evenings, unwraps a towel from his waist and swims with muscular, inefficient strokes. Through the camera lens he shows as a seal: slick skin and splashes that break down in photographs to component parts -- shoulder, hand, bicep -- drenched and moving.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	dug the trenches that we made

Water shapes the dunes of Pont de la Nuit, has for millennia past and will again.

At night it presses against the stone feet of the lighthouse, silent as insect wings and shadowed as smoke. By day the waves retreat to ordinary luminance and bide their time. The stones may be enduring, but like all things they one day will crumble in the patience of the tide.

*

Mathieu visits the pool late in the evenings, unwraps a towel from his waist and swims with muscular, inefficient strokes. Through the camera lens he shows as a seal: slick skin and splashes that break down in photographs to component parts -- shoulder, hand, bicep -- drenched and moving.

He shrugs when asked if he minds the camera. This is a better response than many give, so over weeks and months he emerges in negatives -- frame by frame -- observed from shadows, sometimes shadowed himself and sometimes in splashes of light. The video camera is never a part of these nights; there is no narrative here. There is only water and bare muscles in snapshot, celluloid rectangles of preservation that over the course of time become a fuller image than depicted in any individual fragment:

... Bicep rising out of water, dark valleys and bright sloping planes of muscle definition exaggerated by the photo frame into something alien and untouchable.

... Hand pressed to concrete side of the pool and glimpse of unshaven chin at the top of the frame, looking past the camera lens and behind it.

... Mouth and ear with corner of eye, lips stretched into the formation of a word. A drop of water falls from earlobe into the endless void beneath the edge of the image.

... Faintly blurred bare thigh covered in damp hair that sticks to the skin, resting at the edge of blue water beside the scuffed sneaker of a second person.

Mathieu laughs loudly and says that the lighthouse that crowns the Pont is his. His father's and grandfather's before him, his to keep. His palms are sweaty on the one night when he climbs its stairs to show it off, and at the top among the low-hanging clouds the hairs on his thigh are curled and rough and springy, nothing like just after the pool. The camera captures eyelashes and mouth, blurred by mist and movement.

Mathieu shaves his cheeks more often after that evening, and the photographs speak of questioning eyes above the smoother skin, then linger approvingly on the delicate hollow behind the flare of an ear. The final photograph is the most intimate: indistinct outline of fingers trailing damp paths across valleys and gentle swells of muscle, lighter skin and neater nails than the hand of earlier images, no context but shadows on blue water to suggest that the seal boy of before is no longer the single subject of the camera's gaze.

*

The video camera emerges to film the sea oats by daylight, because still film is inadequate to the motions of the wind and the ocean in the background. Movement is what matters here, so the camera doesn't follow the jut of the lighthouse into the sky, or pan too widely on the shore. Instead it focuses close, on images oddly claustrophobic despite the breadth of the water or the openness of sky. A crab scuttles into the softer sand, leaves asymmetrical tracks, disappears into a hole. A bird stalks another hole, feathers ruffling and waiting for the crustacean inside to emerge. A slip of grass dances across the hard-packed beach sand and lodges in the mud, stuck but trembling still in the wind.

Mathieu seems complete on video as never on still film. He smiles, runs, tumbles, and the camera watches the sand stick to the soles of his feet and in his hair. Video means sound: "Oi, put the thing down and come on."

From behind the camera: "Go ahead," so Mathieu turns and wades out until the water runnels around his thighs. The images show the flare of light on the droplets of the surf, the shadow on the water cast by the cleft of his legs. The shadow traces back to actual skin, and the camera scans upward past the curve of one buttock to spine and to linger in the movement of windtossed hair.

"Come on, slowpoke," called out toward the ocean but drifting back in the wind to shore. The camera tilts down to the water and over to catch the silhouette of the lighthouse, an accidental movement, before the image cuts to black.

*

The lens takes a moment to focus, resolving blurred and vaguely monstrous shapes into more ordinary shelves, battered table, gas fired hot plate with one eye for the kettle. There is no motion here, no calling birds or wind between the sea oats to smother the whir of the camera gears. Instead, the camera itself is what moves, floating through the inconsequential details of the room, fluttering hazy then clear in close zooms and wider frames.

The camera ignores the figure on the bed and sleeping until it has compassed the rest of the room. There is time for this yet, so the images comment mutely on the crack along the top of the sink, the exposed plumbing greening from the sea wind, the cardboard boxes tacked to walls for meager insulation. When finally the gaze returns to the bed, the close-ups rip away context, perspective run like the nose of a lover across the bottom of a foot and around the curve of a knee where scars pucker thick and pale. At the groin the hair grows denser and makes faint noises as it scratches against the glass lens. The penis is small and soft, nestled along the curve of a hipbone, and the camera follows the line down over darker wrinkled lumps to the shadowed cleft beneath. The left leg moves, widening just a bit.

From above, a yawn. "What are you doing?" sounds thick and muffled against pillows or shoulder, so the camera rises to scan up the line of his body and find Mathieu's curious half-closed eyes, grit from sleep still in the corners and drool crusted below his slack mouth.

"Watching you."

Mathieu bats lazily at the camera and the film captures a loud thud when he strikes the side. "Stop it. And come here."

A low chuckle from out of frame. "No," and pale fingers press impressions into an upper thigh, spreading gently until the light can reach between.

*

The ferry to leave the island comes once a day at high tide, when the lighthouse is a lonely pillar marooned off the Pont in silhouette. The ferry is a story of leaving, entrusted to the finality of the still camera and monochrome film. As if to make the point explicitly, one image shows the video recorder in its hard case, packed away against the possibilities of salt corrosion.

Others show the banality of the docks, the tractors that tug barges along the shallows to float behind the ferry and trail across the channel in its wake to the other side. There are weathered men standing in front of the sun, stacks of luggage, the portfolio of enlarged portraits and drawings wrapped in wax paper to keep it safe. There are pictures of pictures: a memorable shot of plush mouth and eyelashes dampened with pool water, removed from the portfolio and propped up against a pillion to contrast the glossy stark lines with battered naturalism, and the youth of its subject with the wizened age of the bargeman staring critically at it.

The bargeman taps his foot, paces up and down -- shot, shot, shot -- and finally turns towards the camera and laughs. The lens faithfully captures crooked teeth and crevices around eyes squinted shut with mirth. A final shot of just the pillion alone, the photo carefully rewrapped and returned to the portfolio, finishes the series, the bargeman in the background returned to his work.

From the channel, the island recedes in huge spaces, distance flattening the hills of dunes into straight lines and leaching color from the sea oats on the horizon. Even from far out on the water, the lighthouse remains visible, rising proud and thick above the sea, constant. One shot seems to capture some slight imperfection in its symmetry, hint of a dark figure barely visible on the deck beside the light, but the roll runs out of film, clicks and jams in the forwarding mechanism before the zoom can etch the faintest hint of detail to the hand held in the air.


End file.
